The Art of Communications

Getting into Cars with Alex

A business trip took me to San Francisco this week, which gave me the opportunity to look up my old friend Alex. He drove all the way out to where I was staying to have dinner with me, but when he arrived I didn’t get his text right away. So he circled the block and waited until I got it and I hurried out to the nearest corner, where he stopped and picked me up quickly at a corner.

We’ve all had déjà vu, that sense that something happening now has happened before, but you can’t remember what. This was like that except that I did remember: countless other times I’ve stepped into Alex’s car over the last 40 years came rushing to my mind all at once.

We met in 1974, in high school. I was a freshman and he was a senior and at that age, those years are a chasm. He could drive and I couldn’t — a stick shift I might add — he had relationships and I didn’t, he’d experienced controlled substances and I hadn’t, though he took care of that eventually. He liked me and more to the point he approved of me, and that meant the world to me at a time when I was struggling with huge family issues that had rocked my self esteem. We were on the school paper together, and when I’d write something he’d take it into the room where the seniors were and read it to them, laughing and putting it up on the board and telling them I’d be the editor of the paper someday… the first time somebody saw something in me. I didn’t see it until he did.

Alex was this impossibly glamorous figure: whippet-thin, blond hair parted in the center and hanging to his shoulders, handsome in a fierce hawklike way, with piercing blue eyes. He played rock guitar like a star, could write well enough to make a career of it if he wanted to, was gifted at math and science, but disdained and minimized all of his own gifts. I remember one time in the late 70s when he picked me up, he took me to the lab where he was working, because he wanted to show me something. I was itchy and impatient to go start partying but he insisted that I look at this tiny thing on a small sliver of glass. “That’s a microchip,” he said. “Someday that’s going to change the world.” One of many conversations I should have continued but didn’t in my headlong rush to go waste my opportunities.

Another conversation that always sticks in my mind is when we first bought a house. I was still in my 20s and in way over my head with a wife and baby, just a kid trying to be a man. The place was the only thing we could afford, a cool little Art Deco bungalow in a terrible neighborhood, a fixer-upper in need of just about every kind of repair. He came over to check it out and we sat cross-legged on the floor of the empty living room, the cool desert air of Los Angeles blowing in through the open windows, the night sky dark beyond them, and he said “your house is beautiful, man.” Just a small thing but again that glimpse of hope and that seal of approval for a step I wasn’t sure of yet. Awesome.

Alex loved David Bowie and he had Bowie’s offhand indifference to himself, the same chilly remove and distance. Actual, real cool. It can’t be faked, or acquired. I’ll never have it, but I sure do know it when I see it. We can be heroes… yeah. He would have laughed then, just as he would now, at the idea of himself being any kind of hero. Every time we’ve met up since high school, he’s talked about me and my accomplishments and acted like I was the somebody. Talking cynical and intellectual and pretending he doesn’t have the biggest heart around, like he never saw a suffering mess of a boy and put a hand out. Like it was nothing.

But it was everything. Thanks, man. I hope you never stop picking me up.